Mission Assurance (MA), as defined by DoD Directive 3020.40 is “a process to ensure that assigned tasks or duties can be performed in accordance with the intended purpose or plan. It is a summation of the activities and measures taken to ensure that required capabilities and all supporting infrastructures are available to the DoD to carry out the National Military Strategy.”
Information Assurance (IA) is the application of this directive in the cyber domain. IA activities include measures that protect and defend information and information systems by ensuring their availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. IA is the practice of managing risks related to the use, processing, storage, and transmission of information or data and the systems and processes used for those purposes. It can use physical, technical and administrative controls to accomplish these tasks.
In accordance with this directive, a principal responsibility of a commander is to assure mission execution in a timely manner. The reliance of a Mission Essential Function (MEF) on cyberspace makes cyberspace a center of gravity an adversary may exploit and, in doing so, enable that adversary to directly engage the MEF without the employment of conventional forces or weapons.
Joint Publication 1-02, DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, defines cyberspace as “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers,” and cyberspace operations as “the employment of cyber capabilities where the primary purpose is to achieve military objectives or effects in or through cyberspace. Such operations include computer network operations and activities to operate and defend the Global Information Grid.”
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) depends increasingly on cyberspace to execute critical missions that are vital to maintaining American military superiority in the traditional domains of land, sea, air, and space. The U.S. is arguably more at risk to an asymmetric attack vector launched by an adversary that cannot, or chooses not to, confront the U.S. in a conventional conflict. In the end, the military advantages that net-centricity provides the U.S. military concomitantly offer an adversary affordable attack vectors through cyberspace against critical missions and advanced weapon systems.
An air gap is often employed for computers and networks that must be extraordinarily secure. Frequently the air gap is not completely literal, such as via the use of dedicated cryptographic devices that can tunnel packets over entrusted networks while avoiding packet rate or size variation. This is the current state-of-the-art. What is really needed, however, is a method and or apparatus that exploits a literal air gap between boards for increased obfuscation and enhanced security.
Free Space Optics were originally developed by the military and NASA and have been used for more than three decades in various forms to provide fast communication links in remote locations. Free-Space Optical Communications (FSOC) have already been explored for next-generation military networks. FSOCs were recognized as having the potential to provide fundamental improvement to the ability to support high-capacity links for network-centric operational concepts like widespread sensor data dissemination. Additionally, it has been shown that data can be encoded using the orbital angular momentum of the light. Optical encoding is now being applied to free-space communication links and can potentially lead to improved security implemented at the classical and single photon level.
Due to the shrinking nature of silicon transistor technology, higher speed and more powerful electronic devices have been realized owing to the dense integration of millions of transistors. The need for high-speed interconnects between chips, cards, and racks have driven research beyond conventional copper based cables for data transmission due to the fundamental limitations, including the electric power consumption, heat dissipation, transmission latency and electromagnetic interference.
Indeed, the rapid advances in optical integration have allowed optical interconnect technology to now enter “inside the box”, at the computer architecture subsystem level. Within the prior a several reconfigurable free-space-based high-speed card-to-card optical interconnect structures have been proposed and investigated, with demonstrated speeds up to 2.5 Gbps. Of these and of direct interest to this endeavor is the experimentally demonstrated free-space reconfigurable card-to-card optical interconnect architecture of K. Wang. et. al. that demonstrated a 30 Gb/s data rate, and the experimentally demonstrated integration of free-space optics with standard CMOS technologies by I. Savidis et al from April 2016.